Sanders Gets First Congressional Endorsement And Continues To Show He Makes A Strong General Election Candidate

October 7, 2015 — Ron Chusid

When Hillary Clinton was thought to be the inevitable Democratic nominee, she received a tremendous number of endorsements from office holders. Bernie Sanders is receiving his first endorsement from a member of Congress, Raul Grijalva of Arizona.

As an outsider, Sanders is not expected to match Clinton in terms of insider endorsements, and this year his outsider status is one of the reasons for his popularity.

While I would not expect Democratic insiders to suddenly embrace Sanders, more might reconsider supporting Clinton as polls continue to come in showing that she does not do as well as Sanders in attracting independents and voters in the swing states. The most recent example I have discussed was a poll from Iowa and New Hampshire with head to head comparisons to Republican candidates.

New Quinnipiac University polls from Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania show that front runners Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump continue to have difficulties in these swing states. Both have high unfavorability rating and Clinton continues to poll poorly against some of the Republican candidates. This and other polls show Sanders typically doing as well as Clinton or better in the battle ground states despite being far less well known. Both Biden and Sanders have been on upward trajectory while Clinton’s support has been declining. While Clinton might continue to have enough support among hard core Democratic voters to win the nomination, her limited support among others makes her a very risky general election candidate for Democrats.

Clinton’s overall support is likely to continue to drop as the scandals surrounding her progress. Today a second IT firm which had performed cloud backups of Clinton’s email has agreed to provide data to the the FBI. Even without the scandals, Clinton is a poor candidate. The trend has been clear that those who see more of Bernie Sanders tend to support him, while Clinton’s support declines as she campaigns.

It is still not known if Joe Biden will enter the race, and if he does enter whether this will result in an increase in support or if he will be seen less sympathetically when a political candidate. The Draft Joe Biden group is releasing this ad nationally, urging Biden to run: